Riverbed Technology

How Riverbed is Ensuring Business Continuity as its Global Workforce Becomes Remote

Riverbed is a global IT solutions organization that provides accelerated performance for applications
across a hybrid and complex network infrastructure and also unified observability which converts
data from various touchpoints in the IT ecosystem into actionable insights to improve performance
by identifying, and isolating the bottlenecks to achieve the shortest possible resolution time. The
company helps organizations maximize the productivity of their digital and IT investments. They
have a long history of innovation rising to customers' changing needs and evolving their business
accordingly. They recognize that customers and employees have incredibly high expectations of their
digital experiences and are often quick to leave if they are unsatisfied. In fact, users begin to lose
focus on the task at hand after just a second delay.

Riverbed prioritizes the workplace digital experience backed by a great depth of knowledge and
insight.  According to Riverbed’s Hybrid Work survey,  88 percent of business leaders are concerned
about the digital experience disparity between in-office and remote employees.
To address these concerns, Riverbed recently unveiled a new unified observability strategy to unify
data, insights, and actions across IT. The company helps its customers to manage the complexity
across their IT ecosystem and break down data silos by delivering solutions through two portfolios:

Alluvio by Riverbed and Riverbed Acceleration

“Alluvio by Riverbed is our Unified Observability portfolio that transforms data across IT into
actionable insights, so organizations can deliver a seamless, secure digital experience. In addition to
our NPM and DEM offerings, it also includes a cloud-native, SaaS-delivered platform that unifies
data, insights, and actions across IT. Riverbed Acceleration, on the other hand, provides fast, agile,
secure acceleration of any app, over any network, to users wherever they are so that organizations
can overcome network performance inhibitors like latency and congestion,” says Alex George,
Country Manager for India & South Asia, Riverbed.

With networks becoming more and more complex, Riverbed India has worked hard to be a local business’ simple solution. “Our offering to customers has never been more integral in ensuring business continuity as our global workforce becomes remote. Our deep expertise in network performance and visibility is extremely valued here in India, particularly as customers look to Riverbed as a source of support and guidance through this time,” he asserts.

Riverbed India’s team comprises several divisions, including sales, systems engineering, professional services, project management, R&D, technical support (TAC), software development, product engineering, IT, and HR. The depth and breadth of Riverbed’s expertise locally ensure that solutions are developed with customer concerns front of mind. This allows Riverbed to cater to all workloads across on-prem, cloud, and SaaS applications and ensures it has the ability to deploy technology unique to each customer’s needs.

The company continues to be a market leader in network optimization and performance management both in India and globally. Together with thousands of partners, and market-leading customers globally including 95% of the Fortune 100, the company empowers every click and every digital experience. They have clientele in different verticals including Manufacturing, Pharmaceuticals, Banking, and Finance. Some of their clients are SBI Group, ICICI Bank, Axis Securities, Lupin Pharma, Timken, Bharati Infratel, Maersk, Shell, Pfizer, OneMain Financial, Rignet, Alstom, AllightSykes, and more.

About the Country Manager

Alex George is the Country Manager for India & South Asia of Riverbed. He is responsible for heading
Sales & Channels and delivering on the growth commitments for the region. He drives sales revenue,
acquires new customers, and measures customer satisfaction delivered through timely
implementations and post-sales support.

With over 25 years of experience, Alex approaches the role of India and SAARC and leads with a
strong skill set spanning channel management, sales management, and business development.
Under his leadership, Riverbed India’s 150-strong team serves over 1,200 existing customers as well
as provides counsel to business leaders who are looking at optimising their IT ecosystem with
tangible insights and improving performance for their business critical applications as part of their
digital transformation initiatives for both their internal employees and external customers.

Alex believes in putting winning trust before winning business. This has helped him create a binding
trust-based relationship with the customers, partners, and alliances. Currently, Alex is pursuing his
management studies in Business Excellence to learn and expand his knowledge and horizon to the
new age business models to stay ahead of his competitors.

Biggest Riverbed USP

Riverbed is the only vendor positioned as a strong performer in Forrester’s Wave for End-User
Experience Management as well as a Challenger in Gartner’s MQ for APM. They have over 300
technology patents and have been recognized 15 times as a leader in Gartner Magic Quadrants
(MQs) for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics (NPMD) and WAN Optimization. They
also have been named as a ‘Value Leader’ in the EMA Radar Report: Network Performance
Management, 2021.

“We have the collective richness of telemetry from network to the app-to-end user that illuminates
and then accelerates every interaction so that users get the flawless digital experience they expect
across the entire digital ecosystem,” he explains.

Unlike other observability solutions that limit or sample data, Riverbed Unified Observability
captures full-fidelity user experience, application, and network performance data on every
transaction across the digital ecosystem. It then applies AI and ML to contextually correlate data
streams and alerts to provide actionable insights. This intelligence also automates the investigative
workflows of IT experts, empowering staff at all skill levels to solve problems, fast.

“With our unified observability platform, IT can eliminate data silos, resource-intensive war rooms,
and alert fatigue. They can enable cross-domain decision-making, apply expert knowledge more
broadly, and continuously improve digital service quality,” Alex adds.

Speaking about new immersive technologies, he says, “We recognize that excellent digital
experiences hinge on IT teams having actionable insights which are made possible by observability.
Organizations want to optimize performance, maximize productivity, reduce risk, eliminate waste,
and improve customer experience. Technology organizations, especially IT, become invaluable when
they can gather the information that can be easily understood and used to make faster, better, more
accurate decisions – fuelling innovation, which drives the business and organizational performance.”

In April this year, Riverbed launched a broad strategy to bring industry-leading unified observability
to customers worldwide and accelerate growth. The company aims to solve one of the industry’s
most daunting problems: how to provide seamless digital experiences that are high performing and
secure in a hybrid world of highly distributed users and applications, exploding data, and soaring IT
complexity through its unified observability portfolio.

Building Holistic Work Culture

The company follows an environment of curiosity and constant learning among its people. They
provide all the support for them to perform better and flourish in a constantly changing tech
environment. “We believe in being transparent with our employees and hence we make it a point to
share data with the team on a regular basis. We have a strong leadership team of supportive
managers who provide constructive feedback and also celebrate achievements,” he says.
The company follows open culture where everyone is free to communicate and learn from each
other. This organizational culture not only helps in better communication, and collaboration but also
helps in innovation.

With the help of excellent teamwork, Riverbed has remained ahead of the competitive curve. They
have adopted the same technologies that they offer to their clients today to overcome the
unforeseen challenges, be it SaaS and cloud performance, end-user experience monitoring, or
having unified observability to get actionable insights into their IT ecosystem.

During the pandemic, all Riverbed employees’ Edge devices were equipped with the SaaS
acceleration solution and WAN optimization solution inbuilt which ensured business continuity. “We
conducted regular mental and health awareness programs for all our employees. We also had an in-
house vaccination drive that helped our employees as well as their family and friends to get access
to vaccines at the early phase of COVID-19,” he asserts.

New Industry Trends

Leading industry and financial analysts predict that the observational market will reach
approximately $19 billion by 2024. Drivers of this growth include the tectonic shift to hybrid work
and networks, multi-cloud environments, and modern application architectures. These changes
make it extremely difficult for IT to extract actionable insights from data and actively manage
performance using existing tools.

“While observability is a clear requirement for customers, the solutions being offered by most
technology vendors are not aligned with what these businesses need. We see the market evolving as
demand grows for observability, which is no longer just for DevOps teams, SREs (site reliability
engineering), cloud-native environments, and APM (application performance monitoring) use cases.
Riverbed believes a far greater segment of stakeholders can benefit from observability from network
teams that can use it for fault management to the line of business teams that leverage these
solutions to optimize their applications,” he avers.

Journey Ahead

Riverbed’s goal is to have sustained and consistent growth by adding value for both customers and
partners using cutting-edge and innovative solutions. They plan to achieve this by being laser-
focused on illuminating and accelerating every digital interaction so that organizations can deliver a
seamless digital experience and enterprise performance for their customers and their employees.
“This is an exciting new chapter for Riverbed, its partners, and customers. We are evolving our
trusted brand, dynamic growth, and market momentum coupled with our visibility solutions to
position Riverbed as a key leader in the rapidly growing observability market. A highly innovative,
differentiated SaaS-based solution, unified through our vision of delivering an observability portfolio,
we will meet an urgent customer need and disrupt the market,” he states.

The company wants to help its clients in India transform large amounts of data into actionable
insights so that they can enhance enterprise performance and deliver exceptional digital
experiences.

This will help their clients to eliminate data silos, and resource-intensive war rooms, and minimize
alert fatigue. They can enable faster, more effective decision-making across domains, apply expert
knowledge more broadly, and continuously improve the digital experience and digital performance
of their customers and employees.

Riverbed is on a growth trajectory with its revenues growing significantly across India and South
Asia. The company is bringing consistency in its growth from quarter to quarter.

Parting Words by the Leader

“We have all heard the adage, ‘Change is the only constant’, but we realized how unprepared we
were professionally and personally to handle that change until we experienced it in real-time. This is
a time to introspect and ask ourselves, ‘Are we prepared for the next change?’
Always seek help and advice as nobody knows it all. We are all in this together,” concludes Alex
George.